Sermons & Homilies
We must take an example from St. Symeon who waited so long in faith. This was an active waiting. It was a daily trial. He had plenty of time to doubt the prophecy. He had plenty of time to give up. He had plenty of time to forget what he was still living for. He had plenty of time to bury himself in mindless worldly consolations, distractions, and preoccupations. However, he kept faith. This was not easy. This was not automatic. There is so much hidden within one line of the Scripture which simply states that he would not die until he saw the Lord’s Christ.
We all have a choice before us: will we willingly accept suffering and death for the sake of the love of God, and so behold those very things being transformed into joy and blessedness and life eternal? Or will we run and hide from suffering and death — only to find, at the end of all things, that we cannot run and hide any longer, and that having refused to meet Christ in them, we are left with suffering and death alone, forever stripped of Christ and of all meaning? To suffer and to die are inevitable. Our only choice is for what we will suffer, and to what we will die.
You who are sick from the pleasures of this world, thirsty in this barren desert, hungry from the secular diet; your Physician has been born to bring health to your soul; You who are barren and made sterile by our present world, the Giver of Life has come; You who are bereft of virtue, behold the author of your course and encourager in the race; You who live in darkness, the New Day has dawned with the rising of the day-star in your heart; You who are dead, Life has come into the world; When the crowds declare that God is dead, the angels, the shepherds, the Magi, in unison, declare, “Christ Immanuel is born!”
Who knows the inner meaning of this Feast? They alone who have experienced barrenness and deadness of soul and now feel pulsing within their very veins the life-giving energy of God Who dwells within them. To taste life, we must experience death. To be thankful for sweetness, we must endure bitterness.
